Video and other rich media are often opaque in the sense that the media's content, source, and other properties are difficult to identify from the finished media product. Such information is often only available if someone has taken the time to examine the media's content and manually associated metadata describing the content with the media. Moreover, information associated after the media's creation may be inaccurate and is likely to lack information not available from an after-the-fact inspection of the media, such as information known only at the time of the media's development. Generally, the earlier information tracking begins in the media development process, the more likely useful information will be captured and included in the media's metadata. Metadata creation often does not occur until the end of or after the media development process, if at all.
Various specific problems are associated in the context of creating metadata for video content. The typical video production process does not facilitate the creation and association of metadata with recorded content. While the processing power of video cameras continues to increase, such cameras are typically not as powerful as general purpose computers, and thus generally do not have the in-camera ability to analyze recorded content for metadata. Accordingly, film clips created by a video camera in a typical production process are not processed for relevant metadata until well after filming, if at all. If the media content is provided for processing, a computer can extract information for inclusion as metadata, as examples, by analyzing the audio and/or video tracks, doing speech to text analysis, scene analysis, logo recognition, and/or other types of analysis. Generally, even if information for metadata is extracted, the information is not available in a timely manner for use in the video development process, such as, for example, to help select among shots, locate clips, provide information on location, etc.